FLORENCE, Alabama - Family photos were tucked into the padded silk linings of two donated caskets, ready to be buried with a mother and the son who died trying to protect her against the unstoppable winds of a tornado.

Sprays of bright spring flowers - also donated - daisies and lilies in powder blue, neon pink and sunshine yellow, contrasted with the gray metal of the coffins holding the bodies of 60-year-old Dorothy Hollis and her son, 34-year-old Earl Hollis.

Mother and son were eulogized at a joint service Friday at Spry Williams Funeral Home in Florence after they died Monday when an EF-3 tornado struck their mobile home in the Coxey community of Limestone County.

Two other family members who lived in the mobile home - Earl's wife, Minnie, and his brother, O'Neal - survived the storm with cuts and bruises. Minnie, bearing tiny red cuts on her face, called her husband a hero before attending his funeral service.

"He was a devoted husband and a family man," she said. "The only thing on his mind that night was helping us through it."

A cousin, Lisa Whitten of Florence, said Earl placed his body on top of the others. "He laid on top of them and pulled a mattress over them," she said.

The shelter was so near

Barbara Smiley, the owner of Billy Barb's Court, where the four family members had moved just three months before, said she tried to convince the Hollises to come to the park's underground storm shelter, which was about 50 feet from their mobile home. She said about 80 people were inside, and it was filled to capacity.

Whitten said Dorothy Hollis was disabled and had difficulty walking and she also suffered from claustrophobia. When she told her sons she was unable to go to the shelter, she tried to convince them to go without her, Minnie said. They refused to leave her side.

After the storm passed, the Hollises' battered mobile home was on its side, wrapped around a tree. All 27 mobile homes in the park were destroyed, as were the mobile homes in the Le-Hi park next door on U.S. Highway 72 in western Limestone County. At least 150 homes were demolished and hundreds more homes sustained minor to moderate damage, according to Rita White, director of Limestone County Emergency Management Agency.

The Hollis family's beloved husky, Lady, who survived the storm, wandered in the rain Monday night. In the absence of her home and her owners, she slept near the trailer's foundation, Smiley said. On Tuesday, a passerby tethered Lady so the owners could find her when they returned. When Minnie was able to return to the scene, "Lady came running up to her," Whitten said.

Nathan McCune, a sophomore at East Limestone High School, is keeping Lady until they get settled. McCune found Lady while volunteering at the site.

They will be moving back to the Shoals, which is where they lived initially. They had decided to move back before the tornado hit to be nearer to family, Whitten said.

The stranger offering to keep Lady is one of many kindnesses for which the family is grateful, Whitten said. With two funerals at once, she is unsure how they could have managed without the help of others. The funeral home donated the caskets and friends - Melissa Aday Vinson and Trish Aday, owners of A Day of Beauty and Shopping - donated the casket sprays.

Because Earl Hollis was also on disability, the family didn't have many material objects, she said.

"What they had was each other," Whitten said. "To them, that was plenty."